Digital Domain CEO Says There’s No Hologram Reagan in the Works

US President Ronald Reagan salutes 11 November 1988 during the Pledge Of Allegiance at a Veterans Day ceremony at Arlington National Cemetery during a Veterans Day visit.

If Ronald Reagan is to make a posthumous appearance at the Republican National Convention, using the same technology that brough late rapper Tupac Shakur to the stage at the Coachella music festival in April, it’s news to the CEO of the company that created “Hologram Tupac.”

“I would enjoy seeing holograms in political discourse,” said John Textor, CEO of Digital Domain Media Group, a visual effects house that has created digital characters for numerous Hollywood movies. “But that rumor isn’t true.”

Textor believes the reports started with a satirical article Tuesday in the Bennington Vale Evening Transcript, a joke outlet that purports to cover news in “San Narciso, Calif.,” a fictitious municipality that exists only in Thomas Pynchon’s surreal 1966 novel “The Crying of Lot 49.”

The faux news article was filled with outlandish claims, such as a quote attributed to an anonymous Digital Domain executive saying that Reagan’s political views “would make him seem like a raving liberal by today’s Republican standards.”

Equally implausible was a remark supposedly made by an unnamed official with Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign. “We were really afraid they were going to give time to Ann [Romney],” the official supposedly said. “An hour of ‘let them eat cake’ and awkward equestrian ballet wasn’t our best idea.”

The article appears in Google News search results, with the disclaimer “satire” next to it.

Nonetheless several non-satirical news outlets picked up the notion and ran with it as a serious possibility for Thursday night’s mystery-speaker slot, including Fox News, which like The Wall Street Journal is owned by News Corp.

For now, the identity of the mystery RNC speaker remains the subject of intense speculation.

For his part, Digital Domain’s Textor had his own suggestion.

“Maybe we can just roll out Tupac,” Textor said. “Cause we’re really not ready with Reagan.”

About Speakeasy

Speakeasy is a blog covering media, entertainment, celebrity and the arts. The publication is produced by Barbara Chai and Jonathan Welsh with contributions from the Wall Street Journal staff and others. Write to us at speakeasy@wsj.com or follow us on Twitter at @WSJSpeakeasy or individually @barbarachai.